


nostalgic for disaster

by Verbyna



Series: Suitehearts [14]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Catholic Guilt, F/M, Found Family, Friendship, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-07
Updated: 2019-04-07
Packaged: 2020-01-06 12:02:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18388061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Verbyna/pseuds/Verbyna
Summary: Nelly's body remembers being a teenager and all it wants to do is escape; it doesn’t understand that they already got out.





	nostalgic for disaster

**Author's Note:**

> many thanks to summerfrost and blithelybonny for weeks of handholding, beta work, and putting up with my fretting in the #hellsquad group chat. this story was known in development as ~the cursed fic~ and boy, did it live up to it.

**July 2019**

 

Nelly’s hosting a Mad Men party on the last weekend in August, but between then and now, he’s pretty much on his own.

It’s halfway through the off-season, and the whole squad plus Zimmermann are doing their own things, which is cool for them. As a group, their shit is not the most together, and they should definitely focus on their own issues when they finally have time for it.

Nelly can definitely control himself and not spam the group chat, but he’s acting so weird and clingy that his dogs are starting to avoid him. He doesn’t have to hold back the spam with Spenser, though. Spenser is a real grownup and has no problem ignoring his personal phone until he finishes his work stuff.

When Spenser gets around to sending a voice message back, Nelly calls Soup and Annie in Portland to see if Annie can squeeze in a double booking at her parlor. She’s booked months ahead, but sometimes there are cancellations, and she may not be into the big hockey squad stuff, but she basically treats Nelly’s life like her personal reality TV show. 

It’s short and sweet, Nelly tells her. Super simple. Spenser found it in Nelly’s catch-all drawer over Christmas and said they need to get it.

It just says LOYALTY, a classic Americana banner that Benji doodled on a napkin once, and she can make time for it in two days.

 

*

 

Spenser started getting tattoos around the time Nelly decided he’d only pop his ink cherry to celebrate his first Stanley Cup.

Spenser got really into it from the start. He’d get crappy little stick-and-pokes and show Nelly a new one on Skype almost every week after Nelly moved to Chicago. He covered most of them up with a half-sleeve in March, and by the time Nelly won the Cup, they had plans for their first official grown-up vacation built around a tattoo appointment in LA.

One appointment turned into two, and three became a pattern.

They only get inked together now. It’s tradition.

(They have patterns and rules for everything, and it’s not because _Nelly_ is big on rules. People who don’t know Spenser assume he’s chaotic evil, some sort of cartoon character, but he’s literally the most lawful dude Nelly has _ever met.)_

 

*

 

Nelly would spare the dogs his weirdness and send them to the sitter early, but Spenser is obsessed with dogs, so Nelly spends the day before they leave for Portland chasing the boys around with treats and pouting at them when they ignore him.

Which is, like, totally fine. A totally normal reaction to being followed around by a very large man. Nelly is totally okay with it.

He stops fronting on Sunday morning, after Stanley full-on growls at him, and decides the sane thing to do would be to FaceTime Chuck. Spenser’s coming over straight from Mass, but Chuck should be home by now after brunch with his girlfriend, and Nelly could use a friendly face.

Or a frustrated cry, but he hates the puffy eyes. He’s way too pale for that.

“Why the long face, chief?”

“Hi. My dogs hate me,” Nelly says, switching to the main camera to show them outside in the yard, staring him down. “I won’t see them for three days! Why can’t they hate me when I can’t see ‘em?”

“Your dogs don’t hate you,” Chuck says. “And switch to your selfie cam, this is creepy as hell. It’s like the dogs are talking.”

Nelly switches back to the selfie cam and says, “They hate me,” but he feels a little better anyway. Chuck is probably right; Nelly’s just freaking them out, but they’ll forget all about it when he gets back from Annie and Soup’s.

Chuck nods like he heard all that. _Ugh._

He laughs at whatever face Nelly just pulled, then asks, “Where are you going? Doctor’s appointment?”

“Nah, Portland. I’m leaving in the morning.”

Chuck’s mouth twists a little to the side on the screen. “Is Spenser there?”

“Not yet. He’ll be here soon, though. It’s Sunday.”

Nelly closes his eyes and breathes out through his nose, listening to the quiet neighborhood, the crash of whatever the dogs just knocked over outside. He can almost hear the echo in Benji’s empty house next door.

“I can’t wait to get out of the city,” he tells Chuck on an exhale. “I’m so fucking bored, bro.”

“And Spenser took time off work for Portland?”

“Oh right, I didn’t tell you, he got promoted. He can take way more time off. Says he wants to go to Mexico in August, but I don’t know, guess it depends on my trainer?”

“He works for his wife, of course he got promoted,” Chuck says, kinda meanly. Nelly opens his eyes and pouts, because he’s five today, but Chuck just rolls his eyes. “Whatever, we both know you’re going. Call your trainer and switch up your schedule. Who’s getting ink this time?”

“Both of us, actually. It’s one of Benji’s napkin things? I want, like, all of them, but Spense pretty much picked my favorite. Annie said it’s cool.”

Chuck snorts. “Annie’s been trying to poach Corey from the NHL since she started dating Cam. Remember their wedding? She literally said she’ll poach him right after Corey’s best man speech. Before she _thanked him.”_

“Classic,” Nelly says.

“Classic.”

There’s a heavy pause where neither of them is sure if they should end the call while they’re ahead or go through with the rest of it. If this were any other day, Nelly could hang up now and wait for Spenser in peace. He feels better, less lonely, but he’s a Nelson and this is a Sunday; it wasn’t Chuck he was supposed to call.

Chuck knows it too, because he’s doing the thing where he’s pretending their parents didn’t complain about Nelly this morning over the phone.

“How are they?” Nelly asks, like an idiot.

Chuck looks torn. He doesn’t say anything long enough that Nelly knows it was bad. Their parents always tell them to look out for each other and always try to get Chuck on their side anyway. Spenser, too: the good boys, like Nelly isn’t.

Nelly doesn’t want Chuck to lie for them.

“Never mind, I’ll call them soon. It’s been a while.”

“Travis--”

Nelly curls his toes into the carpet and smiles his best smile at the phone. “I’ll tell them Spenser and I are going on a trip. They’ll like that.”

“Oh, I’m sure they will,” Chuck says. “Tell him hi for me.”

 

*

 

“Sorry, bro, confession ran extra long today,” Spenser says as he toes off his shoes.

Nelly draws his legs up so Spense can collapse on the other end of the couch and start undoing his tie. He’s at least half an hour late, but Nelly doesn’t mind; some weeks Spenser feels extra guilty, and Nelly got used to it way back in high school. He got really good at video games, waiting in Spenser’s room after Baz moved out.

The bad weeks are the ones when Spense can’t even make himself confess.

That’s when they get each other off.

Today, though, Spenser looks good. Clean or something - lighter than usual, like maybe he got good advice from his priest or didn’t do any lines last night with his dumbass corporate bros. Nelly shoves him a little with his foot, then passes his phone over so Spense can see the cleaned up version of the tat that Annie sent over.

“That girl is fucking magical,” Spenser says, whistling. “Scary as shit, but Jesus, it’s perfect.”

“Hey now,” Nelly says, trying not to laugh.

“Fuck,” Spenser says, then closes his mouth to make a cross with his tongue. He’ll mostly get over taking the Lord’s name in vain by Monday night and he’ll be back to blaspheming full-time by Wednesday, but right now he’s trying to behave.

He gives Nelly back his phone and holds his hands out for Nelly to take the cufflinks out. Simone puts them on for him; they make such a striking couple in the pews, but Spenser never got the hang of cufflinks, even if he sees their point.

(They picked the church with the most potential clients, then moved to the parish and got their teeth whitened to a more American shade of blinding. It’s only the little things that Spense trips over.)

“I looked over that copy for the campaign promo,” Spenser tells Nelly as he gets more comfortable. “Sounds good, but like, pretty dry? Grab an English major from your fundraising team and see if they come up with something.”

“Yeah, that’s what Bitty said, too.”

“Got someone in mind?”

“Cody for sure. They already said they’d do it by the end of the week, and like, I wanna give them more responsibility over their summer break.”

“So you’re promoting them when they go back to part-time in the fall?” Spenser says, only stumbling a little over the pronoun. Progress, Nelly thinks, and doesn’t draw attention to it; he tosses the cufflinks on a tray and shrugs. “I thought you wanted Ortiz in Ops.”

“Bro, Cody could organize a bunch of rabid dogs into a sleigh team, but I can just hire people with experience for that and it’s fine. I want Cody to, like, stick with the foundation. They’d get so fucking bored in Ops.”

Spenser raises his eyebrows at him. “Are you fucking Ortiz?”

“What? No way, too toppy. Also an _employee.”_

“Ugh, why do I ask when I know you’ll go TMI,” Spencer groans, and smacks Nelly with a throw pillow. It gets Nelly in the face, so Nelly shoves him halfway off the couch, and then they’re suddenly sixteen and stupid again for a few minutes.

The dogs join in. Nelly laughs, and laughs, and laughs.

 

*

 

Spenser whips up a loaf of bread from whatever Nelly had lying around his kitchen cupboards, courtesy of Bitty. They don’t have anything to eat it with.

“I make a great wife for someone, but this is fucking hopeless. I can’t believe you still live like this.”

“Aww,” says Nelly. He pats Spense’s shoulder and squints into the open fridge. “We can toast it for avocado bread.”

“You’re everything that’s wrong with this country.”

Nelly hums. “Good thing we’re Canadian, then.”

“Thank God.”

“I thank Him for this, our daily--”

Spenser pinches Nelly between the ribs and reaches for an avocado with his other hand, then closes the fridge with his foot and rounds on Nelly.

“Thank _me,_ motherfucker.”

Nelly holds his hands up and walks backwards out of the kitchen. “Salt it like you fucking mean it, man. I’ll get on the sangria.”

 

*

 

When the church high wears off and Spenser starts thinking about how he’s gonna break every promise he made starting tomorrow, he gets this super specific kind of tense where he keeps talking like normal but his body winds up like a spring.

At some point during the afternoon, Spenser’s shoulders start coming up, right on schedule. Nelly keeps an eye on it without, like, saying anything yet.

At some point Spense is gonna crash, and tomorrow is gonna come no matter what they do in the meantime.

He doesn’t always sleep in Nelly’s bed when he stays over, but he does it often enough that there’s a pillow just for him. Parse puts it in the closet when he’s at Nelly’s place and none of Nelly’s hookups notice or care, but it smells just like Spense does: expensive.

It’s not that Nelly doesn’t smell fucking fantastic, if he says so himself. Miley put him onto some hella niche scents that come in tiny-ass minimalist bottles and mostly smell like one thing - grass or bourbon if it had no alcohol, leather, old books if he’s feeling ironic. But there’s a very specific smell that makes him think _old money,_ and that’s what Spense has always smelled like, just like Nelly’s dad.

(Spenser made a drunken promise once that they wouldn’t turn into their dads. Nelly never held him to that.)

Nelly wonders about that pillow, though. About that smell and how safe it is, even when it curdles in the back of his throat. He thinks about the investment they are to their families - all that money, all those lessons, the time and the plans people made for them.

He thinks about how Spenser looks and smells and acts and repents, and wonders if it would be worth trading places to give his own parents a return on their investment.

He has his own pillow at Parse’s house.

That’s how Parse knows to put Spenser’s in the closet when he sleeps in Nelly’s bed.

 

*

 

It’s 4am, and it’s very cold outside on Nelly’s lone Adirondack. He’s three glasses of gin into this mood and the humidity is making him stick to the plasticky cushions, leaching all the heat out of him, but he had to get out of the house.

If they go upstairs sober, Nelly can’t fall asleep next to Spense. His body remembers being a teenager and all it wants to do is escape; it doesn’t understand that they already got out. He used to sit up in Baz’s old bed and drink Spenser’s booze to get through the night, and he got as far as upgrading his booze, but he doesn’t know how to change the rest of it yet.

He’s only starting to realize that this is something he needs to change, really. Something that won’t just go away because he grew up, like bad skin or forgetting to pack enough socks for roadies.

It’s 7am in New York, so Chuck’s probably at the hipster coffee shop down the street from his apartment, standing in line for mediocre coffee. Nelly bought him a press for Christmas with a bunch of amazing grounds, but Chuck can’t work anything except an electric toothbrush first thing in the morning.

On the bright side, needing his coffee brewed by another human makes him very predictable. Nelly tosses back the dregs of his gin and calls him.

“The fuck,” Chuck says. “Call your own fucking ambulance.”

“Hi,” Nelly says, listening closely to the background coffee shop noise. God, he’d take anything. “No need for that ambulance.”

“Yet?” Chuck asks suspiciously.

“Not today. Tell me something good, though.”

Chuck gets to the front of the line and orders his subpar coffee. He bumps into someone and apologizes, then scrapes a chair back - Nelly flinches - and sits down.

He takes a deep breath, or just sniffs his cup, and says, “We talked about having kids last night.”

“Wow,” Nelly says. “Uh, that’s a big one. So are we talking multiple kids, or?”

“Just two,” Chuck says. “I really fucking hope they’re girls.”

Nelly immediately thinks about Spense upstairs, and Spenser’s wife and her discreet girlfriend of the week across town. How guitar is never the first thing people think about when they think of Annie, despite her Grammy, who only got questions about Soup before she stopped touring and opened the shop with him. About Cody and their holidays on campus, and Nelly’s mother’s career, which was derailed twice.

“Tell me something good and true,” he asks, even if he knows Chuck’s thinking of their mom now, too.

“We weren’t easy, baby bro.”

Chuck was easy, and that leaves Nelly. They don’t talk about it.

“Please,” Nelly tries. “I’m not--”

 _“Don’t,”_ Chuck says, and that’s that.

No wonder he doesn’t want boys, if they’ll turn out anything like Nelly. Chuck would turn into their parents, trying to raise them; at least girls would be _different._

“You know I love you, right?” Chuck asks.

“Still no need for that ambulance, chill,” Nelly says. “I’m actually gonna go to bed.”

This time, it helps that Spenser’s already sleeping in it.

 

*

 

They make it out of Sea-Tac at noon, when work traffic dies down, but hit congestion around Olympia. Spense wants to detour to Dick’s Beer in Centralia, but Nelly’s still a little drunk from the early morning gin and can’t take over driving, so they keep going.

“Put some fucking music on,” Spenser says.

“What are you so pissed about?” Nelly asks, but he grabs Spenser’s phone anyway, holds it out so Spense can stick his finger on it to unlock the screen, and pulls up his Spotify. “Most Played?”

“Nah, you pick.” Spense thinks about it for a sec, tapping his fingers restlessly on the wheel, then levels a look at Nelly. “No Fall Out Boy, though, I mean it.”

“You wound me,” says Nelly.

He backs out of the FOB page and squints at the screen to see if he recognizes any of the covers in the library. It would be super helpful if everyone just used their own faces for the art, but he saved his current playlist on Spenser’s account, so he just hits play on that instead.

Most of the playlist is new stuff from bands they used to listen to. He’s met most of them. Actually, Annie’s on here somewhere - a song she did for a movie this winter, as a favor to the director, who smokes up with her every time he’s in Portland.

Here’s the thing he can’t talk about, no matter how often he thinks about it: Nelly was prepared to become famous. He just hadn’t realized it would mean so many of his friends would be famous, too. Properly famous, not hockey famous, though the line is blurry; Parse is a household name and Miley’s getting there. It should be surreal.

It feels normal, and he’s not sure how he feels about that. At which point it’s normal to live like this, considering what a fucking mess he is and what the stakes are.

“Have you thought about Mexico?” Spenser asks.

Nelly keeps his cringe on the inside.

“Still thinking about it. Like, I wanna go? But I don’t know if I can take that long off my training, and there’s the PT and everything.”

“You couldn’t go in June,” Spenser says, “because you were scheduling your regimen. I was there. I know there are backups for everyone and workarounds for everything, man.”

Here’s what it comes down to: if he goes anywhere with Spenser, it won’t feel like it used to. They have images to protect now. Careers to think about, and people who count on them not to fuck up in public, and it all reflects back on the foundation, which is the most important thing.

On the other hand: he needs a holiday to stop being so fucking maudlin.

Nelly laughs, then he stops laughing because, for a second there, he sounded way too old for his age. Like his body was way ahead and he skipped forward and slammed back into it. Chuck totally warned him about this moment, but it was supposed to be, like, when Nelly couldn’t bench as much as the year before, or his knees got fucked, not in the middle of a conversation.

(It makes total sense it was with Spenser, though.)

“I play against eighteen-year-olds, bro. Remember me at eighteen?”

“Built like a brick shithouse, fast, and mean. Also way less smart about plays, so on balance, not that fucking terrifying.”

“They come in smarter all the time,” Nelly points out. “Hence the regimen.”

“So you’re coming to Mexico,” Spenser says.

“Obviously. Fuck, I hate feeling so old.”

“I know,” Spenser says, smug. Then he says it again, “I know,” but it sounds different this time.

Smaller.

 

*

 

Soup and Annie are in the kitchen when they get to their house, doing what looks like scrapbooking, except if Morticia Addams had done the clipping. Soup looks up from his tiny silver scissors, then pulls his hands apart to show them a string of cutout black felt spiders in greeting.

Annie squints at the spiders, says, “Thicker legs, babe, it’s not Tim Burton,” and kicks out the other two chairs at the table.

The radio is on. It’s just static, and Nelly loves them so, so much for letting him bring Spenser into their weirdness.

No one else bothers to remember that Spenser doesn’t disappear when he’s not around Nelly.

“Make yourselves useful,” Soup says, smiling ear to ear. “Fucking freeloaders.”

Spenser looks terrified as usual in Annie’s presence. Nelly waits for Spense’s manners to kick in, which is absolutely part of the show; he can see Soup’s foot tapping a countdown from five.

“Annie, thank you so much for squeezing us in, and for letting us use your guestroom,” Spense says on cue, only a little bit strangled. It’s weird what a teenage crush on someone unattainable will do to you when you have to actually interact with that person later. “And Cameron! Good season, man, you did us proud.”

“Welcome,” Annie says, and Nelly can _see Spenser dry-swallow._ Amazing.

He takes pity and propels Spenser toward the table. They grab a stick of glue each, because Soup would absolutely stab them in the hand with his tiny scissors if they messed with Annie’s design, and get to glueing strands of black felt spiders around the edges of the current scrapbook page.

“What’s this for?” Nelly asks after a couple of minutes.

“There’s an artist showcase next week and they needed a last-minute pitch,” Annie says. “I did a mural for the gallery last year.”

“Saint Sebastian wrapped in roses?” Spenser asks.

“Oh yeah, you were at the opening with Travis, right?” Annie grins, then shrugs. “I figured a book would be funny.”

“Because tattoo artist,” Soup says, but Nelly’s already nodding.

“Makes sense. Wednesday Addams’ grown up scrapbook, sorta?”

Annie looks pleased. Soup kicks Nelly softly in the shin, since they can’t high-five with their hands full; he got Nelly into the Addams thing one time Nelly had the flu and they all took turns dropping in to entertain him.

“Awesome,” Spenser says. “Congratulations!”

“Anyway,” says Nelly, “I’ve been meaning to ask you guys, do you think Cody should run the fall campaign?”

“My child,” Annie says serenely, “can do no wrong.”

“Cody is, like, twenty,” Soup says. 

“Annie’s child could run the world, probably,” says Nelly, “but can they run a campaign already?”

“Do they want to?” Annie asks.

“Huh,” Nelly says. “I guess I should ask.”

Annie rolls her eyes. Spenser visibly swallows again. Soup hands Nelly another string of spiders to glue to the exhibit, and Nelly has a squad and a Parse, but he wonders if this is what he was looking for when he got them: this table in the yellow light. The static on the radio, the way his wet clothes are drying slowly in the almond-scented air, and people he’d trust with his life trusting him with something small, just to spend time together.

Back at school, Sister Sylvia always told him he has a big heart. She said he should give it to Jesus for safekeeping, because people wouldn’t know what to do with it.

Nelly told her he’s big enough for that big heart, but he never had the guts to talk to her again after he graduated. She always saw right through him.

 

*

 

They have breakfast and head to the shop in Annie’s car. Soup’s with his trainer, and Nelly almost asked to tag along, but he’s pretty sure Spenser would’ve gone with Annie anyway because there’s no polite way to bow out of it, and he might’ve, like, combusted.

(Nelly still has a photo of him and Spenser in Spense’s dorm room with Annie’s poster right behind their heads.)

“How’s your wife?” Annie asks at a red light.

“Very well, thank you,” Spenser says.

“And her girlfriend?”

Spenser barks a laugh, then covers his mouth, embarrassed. “Distracting, hopefully.”

“Please thank her for her generous contribution,” says Annie.

“What?” Nelly asks, intelligently.

Annie raises her eyebrows at him in the rearview mirror. “Simone’s top tier on my Patreon. She just commissioned me to do a mural for the company.”

“Yes,” Spenser says, avoiding Nelly’s eyes. “Yes, I’ll tell her. I’m sure she’ll love to meet you in person when you work at the office. She’s a fan.”

 _What?_ Nelly mouths at him.

Simone’s always known Spenser inside and out, they grew up together, but Nelly didn’t think she actually cared enough to listen to Spenser’s dinner table rambling. She knows, of course, where Spenser goes - and she definitely knows who inks him, since she has a vested interest in his image. But to put Annie’s art in the office, where she and Spenser basically live, they must’ve worked out their arrangement better recently.

It occurs to Nelly that Spenser gives things up to hang out like this.

It occurs to him, suddenly, that Simone is paying for Spenser to get a tattoo that says _loyalty_ to someone other than her, and Spenser picked it.

He wonders when the last time was that Spenser kissed someone on the mouth.

 

*

 

What does Spenser have?

Nelly thought about this a lot when they were kids. Back then, he used to take Spense as a buffer to dinners with his parents and Chuck. Spenser’s family wasn’t local, so he never refused outright, but Nelly knew Spense wasn’t comfortable there.

There was a reason why Spenser went to school on the other side of the country from where he grew up, and Nelly’s pretty sure it wasn’t the school’s sterling reputation. Academically and athletically, it was top tier, but everyone knew what they all got up to; Nelly’s sex toys weren’t even a top five scandal his freshman year, and the rumors about him and Sister Sylvia barely registered in the grand scheme.

It’s not that Spenser’s parents didn’t visit. They did, on business trips, and always brought gifts, but when they sent Spense there it was more of a diplomatic mission than so he could get an education. Spenser was a foothold among the other parents, Chuck explained once, just like the two of them were their parents’ show ponies.

So what did Spenser have that Nelly didn’t, so Nelly and Chuck’s parents always insisted he bring Spense to family dinners? Nelly used to think it was the way you could tell that Spense would grow up just like them, but now he knows better.

Spenser is just better at pretending.

And once Nelly saw that, when they were seventeen and they got super wasted and Spenser used two chopsticks to drum through _From Under the Cork Tree_ from start to finish - once he admitted that he was trying, really really hard, to crush his own dreams so he could be someone’s perfect son - Nelly had to keep the secret, too.

He was Spenser’s best man. He watched the light go off in Spenser’s eyes when he made his vows to Simone, and then Nelly made a speech, and then he went and found Baz, who’s Simone’s second cousin.

They fucked in Baz’s hotel room until Nelly felt like himself again.

Nelly drove out in the morning without seeing Spense again, because sometimes it hurts too much to look at him. He doesn’t think Spense would’ve appreciated being looked at right then, either.

Spense has everything people wanted him to have, and he has Nelly to remind him that he’s a person.

And he has God, of course.

They’re all scared of something, and Spenser has God.

 

*

 

Annie’s shop is, like, Nelly and Spenser’s home away from home. They’ve been here so many times that Spenser goes to man the reception desk as soon as they walk in, because Lola is always late for work, and Nelly follows Annie into her office on autopilot.

She has this giant cross made out of strips of rubber on the wall behind her desk. He knows the story, it was in one of her interviews, but sometimes a cross is just a cross if you feel guilty enough. And he does, as soon as he sees it. Full-body guilt, the kind he heard people talk about after sex they weren’t that into, and the worst part is that it’s _familiar._

He knows the flavor of it in the back of his throat.

“Fuck.”

Annie raises her eyebrows, but doesn’t stop doing her routine, which is good. Computer on, glasses on, a pump of hand sanitizer; two pens lined along the edge of her keyboard and two silent snaps of her fingers like she’s cueing in the band.

Nelly sits on the couch and lets himself slide down a bit, so his feet are propped against the edge of her desk. It wouldn’t be the first time he cries in her office, but usually it’s six shots in, after they close up for the night. She doesn’t judge and he doesn’t hold back, and when they walk out the door, she goes back to her uncomplicated life, and Nelly goes back to whatever fire he was supposed to be putting out.

There’s always a fire, Soup says. ( _We didn’t start the fire,_ Annie sang to twenty thousand people at a time, before she turned her back to stadiums.)

Annie has a Grammy. Nelly has a Stanley Cup. That’s all anyone will ever care about, the first thing people will mention even if they live to be one hundred. The first line in their eulogies was written before they were twenty. They talked about it before, when Nelly and Spenser were here to get their cross tattoos - how Annie and Nelly’s first impulse had been to thank the Lord, but they didn’t think they’d be welcome.

How there’s nowhere for the gratitude to go, no clear categories for their mistakes, no guarantee they’ll find people who think like them or places to go at specific times to meet them.

What does Spenser have?

“Annie. Annie,” Nelly says, “I think I fucked up.” His throat is really dry.

“Explain,” Annie says, over the chimes of the computer waking up. She follows his line of sight to the cross made up of blown tires from her many, many tour buses. “Are you going back to the church?”

“Did I ever actually leave?” Nelly asks, then shakes his head. His buzzed head scrapes loudly against the leather of the couch, and the buzz travels down his bones until it settles in his gut.

“Spenser’s, like, really not okay, is he?”

Annie snorts, but doesn’t smile. Nelly doesn’t say anything.

Someone else should say it so he’ll really believe it, and after a few seconds Annie leans back in her chair and rubs a hand over her face.

“Simone says he’s doing great at work. He landed a big account she’s been after since she moved to Seattle.”

Nelly nods; he helped Spense prep the pitch, since it was a sports company and he knew their marketing people a little. Miley did two campaigns for them. Miley who’s with Zimmermann, who got his happy ending, and Nelly feels guilty about that, too. About how he wasn’t rooting for them. But there’s only so much room in him, and right now, he doesn’t have any to spare for things that are over and done.

“She thinks he was high when he met them, Travis. So no, I don’t think he’s actually doing that fucking great. In fact,” Annie says, “he’s a goddamned mess.”

“Am I--”

“Helping?”

Nelly shivers. He might actually, literally be sick on her floor, right here next to a couch he napped on while Spense got an angel and a laurel branch and the geographical coordinates of their school tattooed.

Annie says, “No. You’re not helping.” Then she takes a long, hard look at Nelly, and says, “I don't know what to tell you--I can't reach you from here. What would your nun say?”

 

*

 

They all have something they’re scared of.

When Nelly was six, Chuck cracked his head open on the frozen pond behind the chalet, and Nelly forgot the number for emergency services.

When Nelly was twelve, he finished every glass of champagne left over from his parents’ New Year’s Eve party, and didn’t hear the dog sneak out of the house.

When he was fourteen, he told the family priest about lying to a girl so he could sneak out with her brother, and he got sent to Chuck’s school.

At seventeen, when he and Spense were fall-down drunk and Spense became a real person, Nelly was so terrified for him that he made Spenser promise they’d always be best friends, and they were. Spenser moved to Seattle because he heard they’d sign Nelly. He could’ve gone anywhere to finish college, but he transferred there, knowing what his parents expected of him and Simone, and he didn’t tell Nelly what he heard about the team, because Nelly had a Cup to win in Chicago first.

Nelly never wanted to grow up like his parents, whose love comes with terms, but here he is.

Here Spenser is, fulfilling them.

 

*

 

Annie calls Simone to come get Spenser. Nelly would’ve done it, except he doesn’t know how to talk to Simone right now.

He stays in the office, scrolling blindly through his Instagram. There are at least ten people he could talk to, but he has no idea what to tell them. Everyone he knows hates Spenser; Nelly’s guilt has been there for so long that he forgot what it was, but people saw it and made up their own minds with half the story to go on.

(Sister Sylvia warned him. He hopes she won’t ever find out she was right.)

“Are you gonna tell Spenser or do I have to do that too?” Annie asks between two appointments. “He’s still doing reception, but at some point he’s gonna come back here to get you for the tattoo, and I’m not one hundred percent about that.”

“He won’t,” Nelly tells her. “He’ll go with Simone, she’ll make up a crisis or something.”

He can’t look at Spenser. He can’t even look at himself. It’ll be better in the morning, after he’s slept, but he has to get there first.

“Actually, can I still get something done?”

“If you say _loyalty--_ ”

 

*

 

Spenser doesn’t shout when his wife shows up. Nelly’s listening for it, but all he hears is the front door and the needles. It goes on for almost an hour, and Nelly can’t hear Simone either, but he knows she’s there, letting it happen.

He leaves a voice message for his mom. He’ll fly over this week, he decides, and take her out to dinner. His dad’s in Brussels for an international case; Nelly learned a long time ago that it’s better to see them separately, and she won’t expect Nelly to start with her.

He thinks he might understand her a little better now. He’s not expecting miracles, but maybe--

Maybe.

When Simone and Spenser are finally gone, Nelly asks Annie to put the school coordinates on him, too. She looks close to done. Nelly knows he’s been asking a lot of her today, and he’ll definitely hear about it from Soup, even if no one else will find out what happened.

Annie knows why Nelly has to get it, though, and she’s patient with him.

She listened to Nelly’s confessions for years, and he’s miserably grateful he doesn’t have to explain about school and what happened there. Someday he’ll tell her the whole story, even the parts he buried in muscle memory - every time he got Spenser off like an apology for something Nelly didn’t even realize he was doing, and every time Spenser pointed at someone pretty and Nelly’s head turned on its own, away from things he couldn’t handle.

She knows the part that matters. She put the same ink on Spenser twice already.

“Do you think we’re getting old?” Nelly asks her over the buzz of the needle.

“I think you’re getting a tramp stamp for your high school and you’re codependent as shit. Sit back and think of Canada before I change my mind.”

If he cries, it’s only because it hurts.

 

(It’ll heal, and his body will remind him to do better. He will put his faith in that if it has nowhere else to go.)

**Author's Note:**

> i'm @soundslikepenance on tumblr. for more suitehearts content, head over to @omgcp-suitehearts. <3


End file.
